Eruditorum Press

Our Imposter Syndrome cancels out our Dunning-Kruger

Slammed, Ergo, a Teaser

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New Wave Superfriends, by Butcher Billy

The wedding last weekend has me a day behind on all my writing, and I’m stuck with two or three extra projects this week as well, so I’ve just been slammed busy this week and haven’t had time to bash out even a little bit extra to post. At some point I suppose I’ll have to master the art of conversational chattiness. Or linkblogging. That’s what people do these days, isn’t it. Link blog. So I guess I could link to this interview with Jaron Lanier, which raises various troubling questions about the economy I’m making money in now and the like. That said, I cannot shake the sense that Lanier is just a really crappy futurist.

In any case, and more extensively, I figured I’d share the introduction to the eventually forthcoming Wonder Woman book. Still no release date yet, but I know it’s been clanking about for a while, so I figure I should show something.

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Nobody indulges in utopian visions anymore. On the rare occasions when people do – the playing at classless society offered by the Occupy movements in late 2011, for instance – the general reaction is, at best, one of condescending pity. Utopians, in our culture, aspire towards harmlessness. The best of them are charmingly naive people you might want to invite over for dinner, but would never actually want to put in charge of anything. More often, though, utopianism is viewed as outwardly sinister. You can see it in the line of political attack taken against Barack Obama. Not just the outright false claim that he’s a socialist (a political view that has produced a disproportionate amount of utopian literature), but the basic claim that he wants to transform America. That this is prima facie a bad thing – that the desire to engage in radical change to improve things is self-evidently terrible and evil – shows just how far utopianism has fallen.

On the rare occasions we do allow ourselves to dabble in the utopian, our visions are almost exclusively eschatological. If there is to be a utopia it can only come after a cathartic purging of society, whether at the hands of the gods or at the hands of humanity’s own folly run amok at last. Some better world may follow from the ashes of this one, but the idea of transforming this world into a better one, as opposed to simply leveling it and starting over, is all but completely gone.

It wasn’t always like this, of course. Our cultural landscape is littered with the debris of abandoned utopias. Many, though not all, emerged from the years following World War II, a golden age of utopian thinking. These were the days of gleaming space colonies and cute robotic servants that allowed everyone a life of perpetual leisure. Entire popular genres emerged from these dreams, only to, starting in the late 1970s, find themselves shell-shocked survivors: a set of images without a purpose.…

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If Only We Had a Reasonable Negotiating Partner…

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Anniversary of the Nakba today, an event that shaped the modern world, creating a festering sore of injustice that still infects global politics.

Also, less importantly, the origin of a situation that provides the basis for a vast number of trite, naive, glib, uninformed political allegories in sci-fi TV shows.

The Silurians got the treatment in their first reappearance in the new series, ‘The Hungry Earth’ / ‘Cold Blood’ (2010).

The funny thing is that, wheras the intentional Palestine allegory worked up in these episodes doesn’t fit the real facts, patronises the oppressed, excuses the oppressors, etc, the accidental allegory works.  Indeed, it chimes surprisingly well witth the Silurians generally.  Every time the Silurians come back they are still squeezed out, displaced, outnumbered… and every time they are condemned when they dare to get angry about it, and exhorted by the liberal hero to stay indefinitely patient, warned that if they don’t then they’ll have lost the moral high ground, effectively informed that its up to them to be forebearing to the people who’ve stolen their world. And they never get anywhere near getting redress or restitution.

Most recently, the solution offered to the matter was for the Silurians to retire again and wait for humanity to become more liberal and tolerant all by itself.  As Charles Daniels argued on the comment threads, this is repulsive.  It says that the oppressed must wait for their oppressors to see the light.  The agency lies with the oppressors.  The oppressed must simply be patient.  Such things happen because humans are just intolerant.  But luckily there’s (in Dawkins’ vacuous phrase) an “ever changing moral zeitgeist” which will inevitably lead us to greater heights of liberalism, without us having to do anything.  (A millenarian idea if ever I heard one.)

Meanwhile, back in storyland, the best solution is for the Silurians and the humans to live apart.  Well, there’s a word for that.  A word increasingly being recognised as an apt description of the Israeli domination of Palestine: Apartheid.

The only bit that doesn’t tesselate beautifully is the origin of the situation. The Silurians retired voluntarily because they thought the Moon was going to crash into the Earth.  A natural disaster / tragic misunderstanding with no cause and no agency behind it is the official, mainstream narrative, not the reality.…

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Audioarchitectonalmetrasynchosity (The Long Game)

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At last, the new series pays homage to one of the most
fundamental transitions of the classic series: monsters that
look like cocks.

It’s May 7th, 2005. The damn Tony Christie song is still at number one, stubbornly keeping me from getting to ay anything new. Snoop Dogg is new to the charts this time, as is Destiny’s Child, and Bruce Springsteen’s return to moody acoustic form Devils and Dust is topping the album charts, but it’s mainly a bit of a slow one in music. In news, Tony Blair wins his third successive general election, but with a sharply reduced majority that in effect starts the clock on his resignation as Prime Minister in accordance with the Granita pact. Which is a fairly good week for The Long Game to air during, given that it is, in the end, a story about the way power functions in the background.

It would have been easy not to do The Long Game. Much as the series could have avoided a remake of The Web Planet, it could have avoided ever touching the 1980s stories like this. The Long Game, in terms of structure and concern, belongs to the Colin Baker or Sylvester McCoy eras. Actually, in a perfectly literal sense it belongs to the Sylvester McCoy era. Its basic story is from the script Davies submitted to the Doctor Who office while Cartmel was script-editing – the one Cartmel rejected with the suggestion that Davies write something more grounded, with the specific suggestion of “a man who is worried about his mortgage, his marriage, his dog.”

The critique is interesting in terms of what The Long Game became. The suture between the two versions is, after all, relatively obvious. The original story consists of the bits about overthrowing a despotic news organization, which fits smoothly into the Cartmel era’s sensibilities. One can fairly straightforwardly imagine Russell T Davies watching Paradise Towers or The Happiness Patrol and thinking “ah, yes, that’s the way to do it.” Actually, the story The Long Game has the most obvious similarity to is Vengeance on Varos, which, if the 1987 date for Davies’s failed submission is correct, suggests pretty straightforwardly that Vengeance on Varos and Paradise Towers are the two big antecedents of this.

There are worse things. It’s not like the 1980s were a wasteland of irredeemable stories. There were some high points, and Vengeance on Varos and Paradise Towers were among them. (For newer readers, yes, Paradise Towers really is absolutely brilliant.) But what’s striking, as I said, is that it would have been easy not to do it. I mean, perhaps not easy to resist turning your fifteen-year-old script submission into an actual episode as a sort of cackling and triumphant “I’m in charge now,” but certainly easy to bury the 1980s. None of it made a particular cultural impression in terms of Doctor Who beyond “they’re the rubbish years.” That is, of course, not true, but it would have been perfectly easy to just never mention it.…

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Traversing the Heavens’ Expanse

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What is “Vaka Rangi”?

The name Vaka Rangi comes from the common language of the Polynesian islands and the area making up the larger geopolitical region known as “Oceania”. Although each region in the Polynesian triangle has its own variations on it, it is commonly believed all of these dialects can be traced back to a common language, which would account for the striking similarities to be found in all of them.

The Ancient Polynesians and their ancestors were simply put the greatest mariners the world has ever seen and the term vaka (meaning canoe, or canoe hull, in several languages) displays the centrality of the concept to their culture. Spurred on primarily by limited resources and the need to manage sustainable populations, the Ancient Polynesians used voyaging canoes to settle remote and previously unpopulated islands throughout the Pacific Ocean, and many scholars claim they further managed to reach any shore that touched the Pacific and Southern Oceans. The Ancient Polynesians were explorers, navigators, poets, mystics and philosophers, not conquerors or empire-builders: For them, each vaka was not merely a watercraft or a means to an end, but a microcosm of Polynesian society and an island unto itself symbolizing the interconnectedness of the village, the sea, the Earth and the Heavens.

Rangi is thought to be derived from the hypothesized proto-Polynesian word “*laŋi”, meaning the sky, or the heavens. The variant “rangi” is found in several Polynesian languages, most notably that of the Maori and Rapa Nui. In Polynesian Reconstruction, a vaka is often given a secondary name to distinguish itself and its people, thus a “Vaka Rangi” would be “A Canoe for the Stars”.

Today, traditional Polynesian navigation is undergoing a renaissance, bolstered by, among other things, the rediscovery of ancient oral history and techniques on the outlying island of Taumako and a renewed sense of cultural pride in places such as Hawai’i and Samoa. Fleets of vaka once again roam the Pacific, this time to share their message of solidarity with the natural world. It is this spiritual exploration of the universe’s interconnectedness that has been a guiding inspiration for my life and provided the impetus for this project, which I hope will help translate these concepts for those who, like me, grew up during Western post-industrialism. I felt the best way to explore this was to call upon another major interest of mine: Experimental comparative media studies.

What This Project Is

Vaka Rangi is the account of a spiritual journey. Vaka Rangi is a personal memoir. Vaka Rangi is an unauthorized post-structuralist critical history of Star Trek. Vaka Rangi is many things at once.

Fundamentally, this project an attempt at a critical history of utopian futurism in televised science fiction, particularly science fiction involving voyaging starships, from a specific perspective and using the Star Trek franchise as a “guiding text”. I chose Star Trek for a number of reasons, most notably for its substantial cultural capital in Western regions and my personal connection to it. I coined the term “Soda Pop Art” in another blog project of mine to refer to a product of commercialized pop culture that attains enough significance and ubiquity to become a kind of shared Western mythology.…

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Not With A Bang

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Some assumptions ‘Closing Time’ relies upon: a man being rubbish at looking after a baby is richly hilarious; James Corden has talent of some kind; it’s still amusing when someone wrongly thinks two men are a couple.  All very questionable.

And, as ever, (heteronormative) love conquers all.  It kills Cybermen because emotions ‘n’ stuff, yeah?  Okay, they did something like that in ‘The Invasion’, but at least there it was any emotion, and it made the Cybermen go bonkers instead of just conveniently dying of endoftheepisodeitis.  Notice the utterly pedestrian, idea-free logic here.  You kill the loveless things with love.  That’s like saying you kill poor people with money.  I know the gold thing was stupid, but at least that suggested the logic of using a magical metallic talisman against the zombies.  And at least, when the Cybermen got killed by gold or gravity or radiation, they were simply defeated and chased off rather than being negated or solved.  Kill a Cyberman with radiation and you simply defeat his physical presence.  Kill him with love and you solve him.  You explain him away.  You fill the empty space that he once was… with syrup.  The Cybermen are worthless now.  They have been emptied out of all threat because their hollowness has been stuffed with candyfloss.  Thus is the rump gothic ritually defeated by the power of comforting banalities.

By the way… remember when Gareth Roberts scathingly wrote about how silly ‘The Green Death’ was because nobody in the audience needed to be told that pollution was bad?  Well… does ‘Closing Time’ mean that he now believes people need to be reminded that loving your baby son is good?  Are we to understand that banal statements about political issues are a Bad Thing while banal statements about personal feelings are Inspirational Drama?  I guess so, since the former is about boring stuff like public health and business ethics, while the latter is about interesting stuff like oooo i wuv my pwetty ickle baby.  Why are the British public assumed to need weekly reminders that love is a good thing?  Why, furthermore, must love always be reduced to a simple and unambiguously positive thing, as though it’s a kind of neurological Angel Delight?  And why is it thought that they need to be constantly reassured that it can conquer absolutely anything just by being felt?  What right to these fucking hacks have to inform us how we are obliged to feel in order to be normal and earn the Doctor’s gormless yawp of excited approval?  And isn’t this constant emphasis on love as something overpowering and perfect just an emotional version of the media peddling of body images?  Just as we are constantly told how we should look, are we not also being told that our feelings should be just as glossy and perfect and swaggeringly healthy?  There is a catwalk for the feelings, and yours must be capable of poseurising their way down it, looking just right.  Fuck off.

There is something repellently wholesome and healthy about garbage like ‘Closing Time’. …

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Kickstarter Wrap-Up

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So, we’re in the final 24 hours of the Kickstarter. It looks like we’re going to fall just short of the goal of the illustrated version of the Three Doctors post  – though I suppose a last minute push is possible. Someone buying the Soldeed video, for instance, would put the goal in sight…

EDIT: Actually, we’re now just $600 from doing the Blake book. It could just about happen…

In any case, if you want to get in on the Kickstarter, you probably should get going – several of the reward levels are deals that I’m not planning on offering again at the end of the Kickstarter. Most notably, the $10 “starter kit” of ebooks is the only time you’ll be able to get the first three volumes of TARDIS Eruditorum at that price for the foreseeable future. And while I may offer commissioned essays and signed books through other means soon, I don’t intend to offer essays that will go into the books again at all.

Finally, a general answer to questions I’m sure I’ll be getting – I’ll be in touch with all of the backers through several means. First, I’ll send out a backers survey in the next few days to figure out the Kickstarter-exclusive essay topic (basically, I’m going to suggest the upcoming Marc Platt audio The Beginning, and unless there’s a sizable objection, do that) and to get everyone’s e-mail. At that point I’ll have a Soldeed-esque THREEEEEE ways of contacting you: your e-mail, Kickstarter updates, and this blog. I will basically use all three regularly when I need to update you with anything.

No, failing to meet the $15k stretch goal does not mean I will never do the Blake/Three Doctors book. It does mean that I’m going to wait until I see how the Logopolis book does, however, before I make plans.

Any other questions I’ll happily answer in comments. Or discourse at length about what I have or haven’t learned doing a Kickstarter.

In any case, I just wanted to use today’s post to say: whether you have donated, are about to, or just can’t manage it, thank you. The last month of running this blog has been an absolutely wonderful ride. I was hoping to be able to get to the original $1k goal that would let me pre-fund the Hartnell book itself, and was prepared to fund it out of pocket if I fell short.

I woke up the next morning clearly not having to worry about funding the Hartnell book again. And that’s just been the beginning. I get to do a special edition of the Logopolis post, to start selling t-shirts, mugs, prints, and other cool stuff, and to start in on the podcast commentaries, all of which are terribly exciting.

And perhaps most importantly, it formed the point where I really started thinking of this as my primary job and source of income, with adjunct teaching as a sort of hobbyist sideline. Which is a really nice and satisfying place to be.…

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About Time I Found Something To Do (Dalek)

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The most fearsome creature in the universe is known for its
love of setting off the fire alarm and toilet papering houses.

With obvious thanks and considerable apologies to Tat Wood, Lawrence Miles, and Lars Pearson. About Time Volume Seven is out at the end of the summer, and will be absolutely phenomenal. 

Dalek

(Serial 1.6. One Episode, 30th April 2005.)

Which One Is This? To the general public and to long-standing fans, the return of the Daleks. Or, at least, one Dalek. To newcomers, the one where the Doctor inexplicably freaks out at a robotic salt shaker.

Firsts and Lasts: In new series terms, it’s the first appearance of the Daleks, the first story set in the near future, the first time the TARDIS is pulled off course, the first earthbound story set outside the UK, and the first mention of the Doctor having two hearts. It’s also the first new series appearance of the Cybermen, albeit not one that “counts.” In overall terms it’s the first appearance of quasi-companion Adam Mitchell, the first appearance of the Davies-era Dalek design, and the first time on television that they’ve been voiced by Nicholas Briggs. Visible only to fans, it’s the first time a story from the wilderness years has been reworked for television. And to the general public, it’s the first time that Daleks ever climbed stairs, since nobody ever actually saw Remembrance of the Daleks. And for production personnel, it’s the first of three stories directed by Joe Ahearne.

Two Things to Notice About Dalek

1. The list of debuts masks the fact that, more than any other story so far, this one is crafted to work simultaneously on two levels. To established fans – which is to say anybody reading this – the obvious focus is the perversity of the Dalek doing things like having its eyestalk droop in sadness while it says “I am alone…”, while Eccleston’s performance, while solid, is nothing less than they’d expect from this Doctor meeting the Daleks. To new audiences – and they do exist – what’s striking is in fact the Doctor goes completely unhinged here, and begins torturing what appears to be a trapped robot. The effect is similar either way – a sense that fundamental rules are being broken and that something very wrong is happening here.

{What are the Metafictional Alchemical Resonances of Dalek’s Psychochronographic Emboitments?

Dalek is haunted by the series’ past. “The stuff of nightmares reduced to an exhibit.” It’s telling that the Cybermen, i.e. the inadequate second rate Daleks, actually make their first new series appearance before the Daleks do. The Daleks are not just symbolic of their usual connotations, but of the still-lurking terror of what the series was. Van Statten represents the way in which Doctor Who and its past were generally considered, particularly in the 1990s. He’s an egotistical, overly privileged asshole who collects Doctor Who props without understanding the beauty of any of them. He’d probably give you that life-sized Dalek prop he owns in exchange for a missing episode.…

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Excuses, excuses…

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Things have been weird for me lately.  In a bad way.  Personal stuff.  Worries.  Health issues.  Melancholia.  And other obsessions, plans, dreams… including a recurring one that I really should’ve abandoned by now…  but haven’t.  In short: no time (and not much inclination) to blog.  The promised Skulltopus post on ‘Image of the Fendahl’ is stalled, swollen to vast and unruly size, stuck at an impasse, erupting out of the Skulltopus category into all sorts of other genres (appropriately enough).  Bear with me, Reading Few.  I will rally.…

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Saturday Waffling (May 11th, 2013)

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I liked that open thread last weekend. Let’s do it again.

So, Nightmare in Silver, obviously, once it airs. There’s been a fan theory going around in comments that the episodes are linearly representing classic series Doctors in some fashion, starting with the Susan reference in The Rings of Akhaten and continuing through to Tegan in The Crimson Horror. I would like to point out that if this theory is to hold for this week then we should be invoking Attack of the Cybermen. So I’m expecting a pointless continuity runaround, personally.

I’m out of town again this weekend – not for a fun reason like the DePaul Colloquium. Just a wedding. But it meant I didn’t get as many work days this week as I’d hoped. I’m currently doing revisions on the Tom Baker material, and finished up Season Twelve. This one should actually be a fairly short book, as they go, although it’s got some very long posts in there and may surprise me. Still, I expect a pleasantly slender volume. (I’m putting it and Hartnell v2 in parallel production, so they’ll likely come out around the same time.)

I’ve also started in on a personal project to create an edition of Blake’s illuminated manuscripts of the form I want to read, namely one that preserves the illustrations and format but swaps out Blake’s handwriting for more modern, readable typesetting. It involves learning lots of Photoshop tricks, but is actually coming along reasonably well, though may be of interest only to me. That said, I’m increasingly annoyed at bogus copyright claims on digital images of Blake’s stuff such that I’m sorely tempted to spend a weekend knocking up cheap paperback and ebook editions of things that are otherwise not available in decent quality.

And that’s my week and weekend. How are you all? 

…

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